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Keith Jarrett - New Vienna makes 'Morning Star's album reviews with Ian Sinclair'

Posted: June 16, 2025

New Vienna is the fourth concert recording to be released from Keith Jarrett’s final European solo tour. It follows Munich 2016, Budapest Concert and Bordeaux Concert. Why New Vienna? As Jarrett aficionados will know, his discography already includes a legendary Vienna Concert (recorded at the Vienna State Opera) whose music, he once claimed, spoke “the language of the flame itself”, after long years of “courting the fire”.  Keith Jarrett’s 2016 return to the Austrian capital brought the flames of inspiration to another historic location with lively acoustic properties, the Golden Hall of the Musikverein, where, at the start of the previous century, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern had premiered works that challenged and changed the course of modern music.

New Vienna, shaping its new music in the moment, is near-encyclopedic in scope. The long forms that typified Jarrett’s early solo concert journeys – from Bremen/Lausanne and Köln to the first Vienna Concert and beyond – had given way, in this concluding phase of his performing life, to shows comprised of shorter, self-contained and contrasting pieces which, in their totality, frequently attained an impromptu suite-like character. And so it was at the Musikverein on July 9, 2016.  Part I – the first of nine parts – is a spontaneous whirlwind of sound, swirling, dense and complex – Impetuous as force of nature. Part II floats chords in silence, and slowly draws out a plangent melody.  Rhythm is to the fore in Part III, an outstanding instance of Jarrett’s capacity to develop separate and interweaving patterns with each hand.

New Vienna is issued as Keith Jarrett turns 80.  Although he has not played live since 2017, public interest in his solo music remains high, with this year’s 50th anniversary of The Köln Concert also generating worldwide media attention.


From ‘Morning Star’s Album reviews with Ian Sinclair' Reviews of More, Remembering Now, and New Vienna

Ian Sinclair writes…NEARLY a quarter of a century after their last album, Sheffield’s Britpop icons Pulp are back. Though it’s perhaps not quite the surprise this epoch suggests – there have been two reunion tours in the intervening years.

I was initially unsure about lead single Spike Island but I’m happy to confirm More is rather good. For those yearning for the heady days of the mid-’90s there are plenty of call backs dotted across the set. Disco banger Got To Have Love being the most obvious, with now sexagenarian frontman Jarvis Cocker doing one of his seedy/intimate monologues before spelling out L-O-V-E.

Elsewhere, middle-aged angst creeps into many of the tracks, from the newly unattached Background Noise to Farmer’s Market’s uncertain excitement of early romance. I’ve only just realised how much Cocker sounds like David Bowie.

A very welcome return.


RELEASED to celebrate the 80th birthday of US piano virtuoso Keith Jarrett, New Vienna is the fourth album ECM have put out from his 2016 European solo tour. The set is made up of relatively short pieces of improvisational playing. While the first track is dense and knotty, the rest of the music is often melodic and lyrical, peaking with parts IV and V. As usual, he closes with a cover of Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

With Jarrett forced into retirement following two strokes in 2018, it’s always good to hear music from his past live dates. However, surely I can’t be alone in thinking it starting to feel like overkill from this particular period of his career (why oh why isn’t ECM releasing any solo concerts from Jarrett’s extraordinary 1970s Golden Age?).

Very much one for Jarrett completists. 

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